Chile Forum

I am developing a business in the Pucon area and am interested in learning the pros and cons of where to develop my website. I remember a post about this topic. Can anyone describe why I would benefit one way or the other as I develop a Chile based business?
Thank you, David

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Well first you start by not posting links in violation of the linking policy for new members.

Second, you need to ask some more specific questions. I am inclined to ban you as spammer, but holding out some hope for some more in depth discussion.

My apologies for the link. Thus, please excuse the innocent error. Currently, I am the director and founder of a small private high school developed for competitive kayakers, average 12 students and 6 staff. There is zero promotional potential for this high school link via this forum. As it turns out Chile is a world class whitewater destination both for rafting and kayaking. As you know many Chilean rivers are in jeopardy of dams, hence the "Patagonia Sin Represas" campaign.

How does this relate to starting a business in Chile? Two years ago I purchased land on the Rio Trancura as a base for this high school to train and culturally explore Chile. Unrelated to the high school trips within Chile it is my goal to expatriate to Chile and develop this property as a rental property.

I have tried to explain myself both honestly and with specific facts so you can see that I am a true allchile forum participant. You can look back at a couple of posts I have made throughout the year and even see for yourself the previous post I have made.

Here are the specifics you requested:
A. I currently live in WV and am working toward my October planned move to Pucon area.
B. Plan to establish a legal business in the Pucon area. Property rental.
C. What are the pros and cons of building a website in Chile versus the US? Note, over the years I have found it hard to find a reliable and quality web designer. I now have one I trust in the US. Any advice on how finding reliable Chilean web design companies is possibly another later question I have.

I hope this helps explain my situation. Again, my apologies for the misstep regarding the link. And I hope you understand that yes I am a true follower of the allchile forum.
Thank you,
David

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O.k. that is better. Just links by new users are a red flag for spammers.

I would not waist my money on any of the Chilean web designers I have seen.

If your target market is foreigners, build it, host it, run it in the States or somewhere else. Servers are at best questionable in Chile, and even if good are relatively more expensive. For a simple informational web site, your hosting outside the country could be as low as a few dollars a year. For a good server, your hosting should not be more than like $20 a month. That is likly overkill for what you want to do.

If you are after an English speaking market, then you don't want a .cl web site. If you are after a Chilean market, then you likly need a .cl. If you build a .cl in Spanish, host it in Chile, you will have trouble ever being seen on the search engines outside of Chile. You can host a .cl outside the country however.

That is all apart from the problem that Chilean "web designers" (mostly just graphic designers with a couple of web design classes) don't know anything about current search engine optimization and web standards. You will end up paying money for an all Flash web site, that looks really cool, and will never be seen by anyone.

I would recommend you go look at the http://www.joomla.org project and the companies that sell joomla based web site packages. You can likly get a basic professional dynamic web site fairly cheap from one of the companies that sell complete packages of hosting, setup, template, and then you just add the content. It will insure you an industry standard system out of the box, and the code under it is being maintained and updated by thousands of volunteers and companies.

Hi David,
Firstly, I'm not in Chile yet (I am moving there in July), but here is my two cents worth, as well as a few things to think about.
I'm a web producer / project manager, mainly on big corporate and government sites, and I also do some design and development for small sites (i'm not fishing for work, by the way, right now I have more than enough!)

I think it's really important that you find a designer/developer that you are happy with & you communicate well with. I'm not sure how well you speak Spanish, but even with a very good level of Spanish, I suggest maybe your communication will be easier in English. If you have a designer / developer you trust and relate to well now, then working with them on email and perhaps skype might be easier than trying to find a company or individual in Chile who can do the same sort of job AND you can communicate well with them.

I think there *are* some designers/developers in Chile who understand SEO, and standards compliant HTML/CSS, but they are harder to find than perhaps other countries, as it seems to be less understood and demanded. I agree with admin - if you end up with an all flash based site, it will look pretty, but it will be very unlikely to appear in any searches.

There are many different content management systems around, many which are free and fast and easy to implement. Joomla! is one, but by no means the only one: <LINK REMOVED BY ADMIN>

-Rachel

oops, just read the link posting policy (sorry, have not been reading all posts). Sorry I had not posted 10 times before adding a link, but hopefully it's obvious i'm not a spammer or a bot.

My $0.02 worth for start up sites.

1) Get a .mac now known as a .mobileme account $99 per year, from Apple.
2) Get a .com name $10 a year or cheaper, splurge buy 10 years.
3) Buy a macbook $900 with iLife on (iLfe is free software).
4) Use the iWeb templates (in iLife) and add your content, picture verbage phone numbers etc, upload to your .mac account under your .com name, they allow commercial websites and you won’t come near the web use ceiling for the account.
5) They have powerful redundant web servers and a respected following, once it was not as acceptable to use something like .mac as a host for a business site, now it is your .com name so no one knows where it is hosted.
6) Easy to do yourself and you will need the computer anyways to communicate when you are in Chile. As you grow the business you may want to evolve the site and pay someone to up its quality, the Google optimization can be paid for directly to Google cutting out the web developer.
7) PM me I’ll tell you where to send my consulting fee

Google optimization can be paid for directly to Google

In what world is buying advertising from Google the same as SEO?

The iLife templates are search engine optimized in their own way, they work I’ve seen a site go from new to 4th or 5th ranking in 1 month using their templates. Buying a $0.05 a click in a low volume site from Google won’t hurt either.

There is much much more to SEO that simply something that Google can read (although that helps), and the rules change constantly. It is like practicing medicine or practicing law. Done wrong, you can do damage to a domain by bad SEO practices.

Also Google adwords for the novice can be a complete waist of money. I have seen people blow $5,000+ a month budget on Google adwords, and not see one cent in sales (or even just a few more visitors). I have also seen people take a couple hundred dollars a month and role it in to thousands in Sales. There are also many markets for which google adwords are just by the nature of it a waist of time and money.

Obviously, there are way to many factors in any given web site or market for someone starting their first web site by themselves to be able to handle in dealing with SEO or online advertising campaigns. It is just pissing money in the wind without someone with real experience to operate it.

admin wrote:Also Google adwords for the novice can be a complete waist of money.

At the very beginning of the Google Adwords, there was a "moment", that lasted some 6 - 12 months, or so, when one could use it quite effectively, just like at the very beginning of "overture" (formerly known as "goto") there was a "moment".. and just like at the very beginning of it all (oh, does anyone remember hand-feeding altavista, infoseek, hotbot and lycos?), there was a "moment"..